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|)ACE, epoch, surroundings, these are the three 
-^*^ primordial forces, says M. Taine in the bril- 
liant introduction to his History of English Litera- 
ture, which, determining all later characteristics 
and productions of a people, ought first of all to 
be studied, if we would understand truly the 
literature of any period or of any country. Is it not 
also true, that if we would know any great man and 
estimate aright the work he has given to the world, 
we m.ust ask some questions as to the stock whence 
he sprang, his environments, especially at the most 
impressionable period of his life, and the forces and 
requirements of the day of his appearance ? 

Thomas Carlyle's message has been to all English- 
speaking peoples, and he was not a man given to 
needless assertion of his nationality, or of protesta- 
tion of his love of country, but his character is so 
essentially Scottish, and the marks of this are so evi- 
dent even in circumstances where he breaks entirely 
loose from Scottish traditions, that in his case it will 
not be found idle to give some attention to the points 
just indicated. 

The Lowland Scotch are, like the English, mainly 
Saxon, but with a much stronger intermingling of 
Oeltic and Scandinavian elements. The steadiness. 



4 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

settling often into stolidity ;, which marks the Saxon, 
is certainly not wanting, but is less deeply ingrained, 
and yields oftener to a stern and irresistible enthu- 
siasm in the Scot than in the Southron. The steady 
conservatism with gradual reform, so justly the boast 
of England, is much less characteristic of Scottish 
history, which has oftener violent changes to record. 
The fervid imagination of the Celt absorbed into the 
more truth-loving Saxon nature may be the spring 
of that devotion to an idea that again and again has 
determined the course of Scotland's history, and the 
hardiness and contempt of ease which were often her 
best defense against her enemies, the legacy of the 
early Viking settlers. 

The Scot, too, was trained in a different and far 
harder school than the Englishman. His land is 
rugged, often barren, and yielded but a scanty subsis- 
tence to hard toil, and he was obliged to be in con- 
stant readiness to repel the attacks of his richer and 
stronger neighbors of the South. Think of the 
long years of the Wars of Independence, when the 
country was devastated, not only by the armies of 
the English king, but by the Scots themselves, as a 
means of defense, and which gave ever afterwards 
to their patriotism its passionate and aggressive tone. 
I am not an Englishman was the first article in a 
Scotchman's creed. This article was taught, and 
with some emphasis, to the English at Bannockburn, 
but though the Scottish nationality was never again 
in such danger, the raids from the "auld enemy " 
continued to harass them. Think, too, of the long 
years of internal strife, when the kingdom was so 



THOMAS CARLTLE. 5 

often under the curse of the prophet : " Children 
were its princes, and babes ruled over it." Anyone 
who has traveled in the southern districts of Eng- 
land and Scotland must have noted the absence in 
the latter of those beautiful, quiet, old-world towns 
and villages so characteristic of England, where the 
minster built by the monks centuries ago, still 
stands ready for its holy uses, and the old gabled 
houses round which the children are playing to-day 
seem to have sheltered a hundred generations. 
North of the Tweed we have our ancient abbeys 
and our mediseval barons' keeps, but they are in 
ruins, and as for ordinary homes few indeed have 
survived in a country where a man could congratu- 
late himself like Wat Tinlinn, that his house had not 
been burned for a year or more. 

The roughness of these marauding times was not 
yet subdued when a new element, the most impor- 
tant factor of all in the History of Scotland, broke 
it up into new factions. "I came not to send peace 
on earth, but a sword," was once more proved true. 
Nowhere did the great Protestant idea — the respon- 
sibility of each man to his Maker — take a firmer 
hold than in Scotland, and though the New Light 
had to struggle here as elsewhere against open 
enmity, and still more dangerous, interested and 
selfish partisanship, it sank so deep and became so 
fruitful, that henceforth the energies of the nation 
were turned into new channels. Though the Eefor- 
mation wars were marked by cruelty and rapacity on 
both sides, yet the heart of the nation was then 
thinking out the question " What is man's chief 



6 THOMAS GARLTLE. 

end/' and did arrive at a conception in answer to it^ 
which has been the foundation of all that is worthiest 
in its history since that time. There was no com- 
promising, no concessions, as with the English 
reformers. The change was radical, and though we 
may regret the intolerance and headlong iconoclasm- 
of our ancestors, yet their zeal for the whole truth, 
their earnest anxiety to get at the " eternal fact of 
things," is our most precious inheritance. One in- 
stitution of priceless value, that of the parish 
school, dates from this time. It was John Knox's 
plan, scorned as a devout imagination by the nobles,, 
to apply the whole of the immense wealth taken 
from the Roman Catholic Church to religious and 
educational purposes, and though it was partly 
thwarted by these same greedy barons, enough was 
done in the establishment of schools to make educa- 
tion possible to all. Later, when the leaven had 
had time to work, and when dense ignorance still 
prevailed in English rural districts, it was rare to- 
find in the south of Scotland a peasant who could 
not read. 

As time went on, the power of the nobles, here as 
elsewhere, was weakened, and after the Stuarts were 
seated on the English throne that divine right of 
kings for which they made so desperate a bid, was 
more exercised in Scotland than was ever possible in 
the sister kingdom. This despotism was brought 
to bear, too, on the point on which the Scot was 
most sensitive and most tenacious of his rights — his 
religion. That terrible "killing time," as it was 
called when the infatuated kings tried through ban- 



THOMAS GARLYLE. 7 

ishment, slavery, torture and death to force episco- 
pacy on a nation covenanted to oppose it, has left 
indelible marks on the national character. It is easy 
to find fault with these stern covenanters. They 
mav have been one-sided and intolerant, but it is not 
easy to be tolerant of a religion which is preached to 
you by gun-shot, and, in the main, their battle was 
one of right against might. 

In*tlie, more peaceful years that followed the 
Eevolution and the Union, the Scottish people had 
time to develop their powers and resources. In spite 
of the two short Jacobite outbreaks, the country had 
more unbroken peace than it had enjoyed for cen- 
turies, and progress was rapid, both in material pros- 
perity and intellectual advancement. The 18th cen- 
tury culture, together with the inevitable reaction 
from the high- water mark of religious feeling, had 
brought about in high circles an atmosphere of cold, 
sometimes sceptical, reasoning, and had given rise to 
an elegant and polished literature, more French than 
Scottish in character. But in the masses of the 
people the current of religious life still ran in the 
channels which had been worked out at the Refor- 
mation and deepened by the times of persecution. 
Before the close of the century the influence of Burns 
had begun to warm the heart of the nation, and, by 
awakening its genial qualities which strife and op- 
pression had kept too long in abeyance, to broaden 
its sympathies and soften its asperities. 

What, then, had been the outcome of all these in- 
fluences we have glanced at, and what manner of 
man was the Scot of a hundred years ago ? It is 



8 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

hard, says M. Taine, to be born in Scotland ; and 
though her sons and her daughters have nothing but 
amusement to return for the Frenchman's compas- 
sion, it is to be confessed that it is not there that 
the lighter graces of life will be seen in perfection. 
This Scotchman, whom we would picture, is almost 
aggressively independent, proud and shy, yet not too 
shy to push his way in the world. He is reticent, 
but scarcely cold in his manners, which are marked 
indeed by a suppressed vehemence of feeling, apt at 
times, though rarely, to overcome him, and leave 
him ashamed of the outburst. He is grave in his 
conversation, and prone to silence, yet not without 
the gift of laughter, and with a fund of shrewd, 
dry humor. His affections are strong, but he is 
exceedingly reserved in his expression of them. 
" Love is an awfu' like word to use, when folk's 
weel^ " the Scotch laddie in a recent story says, and 
the touch is true to the life. Up to a certain point 
the Scot is cautious. Once thoroughly roused, he is 
capable of risking everything for the one end in 
view. He is argumentative, fond especially of theo- 
logical discussion, yet reverential in his religion and 
austere in his ideal of morality. 

Such a man was Carlyle's father, and such a man, 
in many respects, was Thomas Carlyle himself. 

Carlyle was born in the year 1795, in Ecclefechan 
in Dumfriesshire — a small, solidly built village. Its 
surroundings are bare and bleak, but with a wide 
outlook across upland stretches to the Border hills. 
His home was one destitute of luxuries, but above 
want, and the poverty of the family was of that 



THOMAS CABLTLE. 9 

wholesome, self-respecting order which asks and 
needs no commiseration. The father was a stone- 
mason, afterwards a farmer, known for his thorough 
handiwork. A God-fearing man, but in whom the 
rugged border characteristics were still strong. He 
was specially noted for his pithy energetic language 
— the dread of those who roused his just indigna- 
tion. His son records as his deliberate opinion of 
him that he had scarcely known any man of larger 
natural endowment. In his family he was a stern, 
grave man, with a strong contempt for idle talk, or 
' clatter,^ as he called it, and his children, though 
honoring him for his sterling sincerity in thought, 
word and deed, could, in their younger days, scarcely 
get near enough to him for love. It was not so with 
his wife. Hers was a strong, tender nature, full of 
seeking anxious mother-love, with keen instincts 
and wide sympathies. Her son loved to think she 
came of good stock. " She was of the, to me, fairest 
descent," he says, ''that of the pious, the just, and 
the good." There was a large family, and work for 
all as soon as they were fit for it, but their daily 
toil, exacting though it was, did not absorb all their 
thoughts. Books were in the house, and they were 
read. Religious influences, too, cast strong lights 
on their simple life. The Oarlyles belonged to the 
Seceders, a body of Presbyterians who left the 
Church of Scotland when the 18th century chill had 
began to benumb its powers. In his old age Carlyle 
writes of the little thatched meeting-house where 
they worshipped, "■ It was more sacred to me than 
the biggest cathedral then extant could have been," 



10 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

and, far as he travelled from his old belief, to the 
very end the Church of his childhood held him with 
the " strong hand of her purity." 

There is little to be recorded of Carlyle's child- 
hood. Very soon a loneliness of temperament and a 
certain perversity of temper which made him as his 
mother said, "gey ill to deal wi," discovered them- 
selves, but there was manifested also such vigour of 
mental parts as made his father determine to give 
him the best education open to him, in the hope 
that he would enter the Church. To Annan Gram- 
mar School he went, therefore, and whoever wishes 
to know something of his impressions — we will not 
say the exact facts — of his school life, may consult 
his description of Hinterschlag in Sartor Eesartus. 
He has not much good to say of his teachers. " How 
shall he give kindling," he asks, ''in whose own in- 
ward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt to a 
dead grammatical cinder ? " School days were soon 
over, and at fourteen the boy was launched into the 
very independent life of a student in the Edinburgh 
University. It was then the very heyday of Edin- 
burgh's splendid literary period. Scott had written 
his Lay of the Last Minstrel, Jeffrey was at the head 
of the Eeview, the Quarterly had just been started, 
and the best wit of the three kingdoms used to con- 
gregate at the Friday club. But all this brilliant 
life did not touch that of the solitary Annandale 
lad. He did not distinguish himself except in 
mathematics, and his college life is painted in Sartor 
in no brighter colors than his school days. " The 
young," he says, '^ looked up to their spiritual 



THOMAS CABLYLE. 11 

nurses, and for food they were bidden to eat the 
east wind/' Already a little scornful, as he always 
was, of everything that did not fall in with his own 
current of thought, his studies in the classics 
brought him little delight. Cicero was to him *'a 
windy person,"^ and Horace '^egotistical." Only in 
mathematics did he find satisfaction — there, at 
least, the conclusions could not be gainsaid, and it 
was a rdSt for his earnest mind to find somewhere a 
firm footing. 

But far deeper questions were rising in him, and 
already, as he tells us, "a certain ground plan of 
human nature and life began to be fashioned in him." 
These considerations were brought home to him 
more forcibly from the fact that his parents had 
destined him for the Church, and the thought was 
forced on him, '' If I am to speak to men on life and 
immortality, what do I myself believe ? " He began 
his Divinity course, however, and as the Theological 
session was short, supported himself by teaching in 
the intervals. One of these engagements was at 
Kirkcaldy, where he stayed three years, a time 
chiefly memorable for his friendship with Edward 
Irving and his attachment to Margaret Gordon. 
The latter was perhaps a thing more of the imagina- 
tion than of the heart, and his renunciation of her 
left him with a widened horizon of thought and 
feeling, and with no very serious wound to be healed. 
His love for Irving was life-long. They were a 
strangely contrasted pair, these two young men who 
used to pace the Kirkcaldy sands discoursing on all 
things in heaven and earth. Irving's was a sunny. 



12 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

genial, trusting nature ; Carlyle's mood}^ reserved, 
yet vehement. Irving had begun to preach already, 
and the gist of his sermons, we are told, was always : 
" If these things are true, why not do it ? You had 
better do it. There will be nothing but misery and 
ruin in not doing it." The homily might have been 
Carlyle's own. Both were intensely convinced that 
any enduring activity must be rooted in belief — 
but belief in what ? Here came the parting of the 
ways. Irving thought that society had become bar- 
ren and unfruitful because it had let slip many be- 
liefs which had nourished the virtues of earlier 
times. To Oarlyle, the explanation was that men 
were holding on through supineness and cowardice 
to a creed which they no longer believed. Irving, 
eager to show that to him Christianity was no dead 
letter, impatient to embody his faith in some mani- 
fest way, and dreaming that through him his genera- 
tion was to be guided into the Church of the Future, 
was led into a region of unreality where beliefs were 
not tested by reason and experience. Latter-day mir- 
acles, prophesy ings, gifts of tongues, all were ac- 
cepted as signs of the Divine favor, and the workers 
of these wonders received as heaven-sent. We 
know how it ended — how, cast out as a heretic, he 
found himself not a chief pillar in the Church, but 
the tool of a small set of enthusiasts, perhaps even 
Charlatans. He died of the disappointment, but it 
did not kill his trust in his fellow-men, nor his faith 
in God. Carlyle's temptations were altogether of a 
different order. Irving could never believe anybody 
less true than himself. Carlyle could with difficulty 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 13 

believe others as true as lie was. It was from no 
petty jealousy — rather from an exacting nature — 
*'to be wroth with those we love doth work like 
madness on the brain," and just because he would so 
fain have held his fellow-men in love and reverence, 
he was possessed with a sort of rage against whatever 
in them seemed to savor of shallowness and insin- 
cerity. It was an indignation that had a noble ele- 
ment in* it, but his natural irascibility and impa- 
tience of temper strengthened and exaggerated it, 
until, in later life, it became his habitual mood. 

Carlyle^s heart was never in his school work, and 
as soon as he had saved a little money he came back 
to Edinburgh. The "grave prohibitive doubts" 
which had assailed him were now so grave, that work 
in the Church could not be thought of. It was a 
serious disappointment to his father and mother, 
and knowing this, Carlyle suffered too. He used to 
look back on that time and the two or three years 
that followed as the most miserable of his life. His 
health was bad, his prospects were uncertain. He 
was conscious of power without knowing how to use 
it, "all budding with capabilities," as he tells us in 
Sartor, "but knew not yet which was his main and 
true one." Around him, too, he saw poverty, dis- 
content, the poor still paying in famine prices for 
the wars with France, and the rich working for 
safety only in repression In his morbid state, he 
was as "a nerve o^er which do creep the else unfelt 
oppressions of the world." The times were out of 
joint, and, worst of all, questioning eternity, he 
heard no satisfying answer, and could find no cur- 



14 THOMAS GARLYLE. 

rent setting towards good, to which his own fate and 
that of his fellow-men could be trusted. He felt 
that a true conception of his relation to the Universe 
is a man's only right basis of action, yet what rela- 
tion was possible when everywhere he felt himself 
confronted with unexplainable, unconquerable evil ? 
He craved sympathy, but his trouble drove him into 
a bitterness which estranged it. Irving and his 
mother were his best friends in those dark days. 
Irving held always before him high hopes of the 
work he was one day to do, and, though his mother 
could not answer, could not even understand the 
difficulties that beset him, through her, Oarlyle knew 
always of one life nourished on faith in good. He has 
described to us in Sartor, and in more explicit terms 
elsewhere, how deliverance from this misery came to 
him. He was walking the streets one day in this dis- 
tressful mood, when all at once, as with a flash of 
light, he saw that whatever this evil was, this horror 
before which his soul had been crouching, he was 
free to defy it, and deny its claim over him. He 
spoke his emphatic " Get thee behind me, Satan," 
and thereupon, as he tells us, he began to be a man. 
But what to do with his manhood was still the 
question. He had been studying law and taking a 
few pupils in mathematics, but his mind was more 
and more turning towards literature. An engage- 
ment as tutor with a family called Buller, gave him 
more congenial work than he had hitherto had, and 
left him leisure for study and writing. He wrote 
and translated scientific articles, and above all, threw 
himself into the study of G-erman literature. His 



THOMAS CARLTLE. 15 

acquaintance with English writers was already wide 
and deep, but none of these had so directly influ- 
enced his thought as had such men as Kichter and 
Goethe. Modern German authors were still little 
known in England, and were generally spoken of 
contemptuously — though, perhaps, with only a 
vague meaning attached to the words — as Mystics. 
To Cariyle their work seemed more founded on 
reality than any recent English Literature. It may 
be fitting to quote here from his essay on this sub- 
ject some words which throw light on the high 
ideal of the calling of a literary man he found 
amongst the Germans, and by which he himself 
took his stand. ''There is a Divine Idea pervading 
the visible Universe, which visible Universe is in- 
deed but its symbol and sensible manifestation. To 
the mass of men, this idea lies hidden, yet to dis- 
cern it, seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condi- 
tion of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom, and 
the end therefore of all spiritual effort in every 
age. Literary men are appointed a priesthood of 
this Divine Idea, a perpetual priesthood, we might 
say, standing forth, generation after generation, as 
the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting 
wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in 
such particular form as their own particular times 
require. For each age is different from every other 
age, and each demands a different interpretation of 
the Divine idea, the essence of which is the same in 
all." 

We shall see how faithful Oarlyle remained to this 
ideal, and with what steady self-denial he repelled 



16 THOMAS GABLTLE. 

all temptation to lower it. The immediate out- 
come of his German studies was a life of Schiller, 
published anonymously, and which seems to have 
given little satisfaction to himself, and a transla- 
tion of Groethe's "Wilhelm Meister." He sent a 
copy of both books to the old poet at Weimar, and 
was rewarded by a letter which began an intercourse 
that lasted till Goethe's death. Goethe, indeed, 
was one of the first to recognize in Carlyle not only 
a clever writer, but a great moral force which in 
the end must make itself felt. 

The sojourn with the BuUers was of benefit to 
him in many ways. He was enabled to help his 
own family, as he was always eager to do, and he was 
introduced to a society from which, in spite of his 
scornful comments on it, he learned much that was 
useful to him. But he was impatient to be wholly 
his own master, partly because he was, as he says, 
"a skinless creature" suffering from ill-health 
which made him nervous and irritable, partly be- 
cause he felt he must be freer for working out into 
clearness the conceptions fermenting in his brain. 

"I have books to write, and things to say in this 
world," he writes to his mother, " which few wot 
of." 

Another circumstance, too, was now making the 
problem of his daily life more difficult, if also more 
interesting to him. Already, before his connection 
with the Bullers, there was, he tells us, "one happy 
island in his forlorn, dreary existence," and of course 
there was a Miranda in it. Jane Welsh, when she 
and Carlyle first met, was a bright, beautiful girl of 



THOMAS CARLTLE. 17 

twenty-one, conscious of unusual powers, and full of 
literary ambitions. She was of a decided, courageous 
temper, capable of devoted love, capable too, of 
bitterness, wlien wounded, and, alas! as skinless as 
Carlyle himself. " This paradox of a woman,'^ her 
friend Mrs. Oliphant calls her, "full of intolerance 
and patience, of kindness, irritability, quick anger, 
love, eijjihusiasm, cynicism." Theirs was a long, 
strange wooing, and the love-letters on both sides 
contained some very hard, unpalatable sayings. 
Carlyle made it very plain that he had no intention 
of conquering fortune that he might have wealth 
and position to lay at his lady's feet. He had chosen 
his lot — to deliver himself of his message to his 
f ellowmen, regardless of popularity — and he knew 
that for such work the day's wages are usually small. 
He would not change his aims even for the woman 
he loved ; if she could not tread this hard way with 
him, it would be better to part. It was no small 
sacrifice he asked from one whose present surround- 
ings and possible future were as bright as Jane 
Welsh's, and she did not conceal that she thought 
the conditions hard, but to part with him would 
have been harder still. At last she was won, and in 
spite of all Mr. Fronde's inferences and conclusions, I 
think she was fully won. They were married in 
1826 and settled in Edinburgh, Carlyle, after many 
plans for bread-winning rejected and entertained, 
being now fully committed to a literary life. 

The subject of the domestic happiness or unhappi- 
ness of the Carlyles has been discussed ad nauseam. 
Carlyle, was, no doubt, irritable, and it cannot be 



18 THOMAS CARL TLB. 

denied that in his devotion to his own high aims, he 
was too apt to forget that his wife's nature needed 
room for development as well as his own. No doubt 
they sometimes made each other unhappy, but that 
their married life was one long tragic disappointment 
is, I think, a fiction which we owe to the fertile and 
ingenious brain of Mr. Froude. 

In Edinburgh, Carlyle was at last beginning to be 
known as a man who might make his mark, and his 
wife's social charm soon attracted round them a 
small circle of appreciative friends. Of these the 
most notable and one of the most intimate, was 
Jeffrey, the " Arch-critic " himself. His friendship 
was immediately serviceable to Carlyle in admitting 
his articles to the Edinburgh Eeview, and he made 
earnest, but unsuccessful efforts to secure for him a 
chair in the University of London, and afterwards of 
St. Andrews. It was about that time Carlyle began to 
write a novel — never finished — which was recently 
published and his friends are now allowing to appear 
under the name of Wotton Eheinfried. The life in 
Edinburgh, however, was found to be too expensive 
to be kept up on the slender available resources, and 
Carlyle found the social interruptions irksome ; so 
nothing better offering, the young couple went to 
live for seven long, lonely years on a property in 
Dumfrieshire, belonging to Mrs. Carlyle — a solitary 
moorland house, "gaunt and hungry-looking," called 
Craigenputtock. How solitary it was may be 
gathered from the fact, that once at least, three 
months passed without any stranger, not even a 
beggar, having stopped at the door. 



THOMAS CARL TLB. 19 

In this lonely dwelling Carlyle settled down to 
think and work, while his wife bravely did her part 
in creating a habitable home under very unpromising 
circumstances. The chief literary work continued 
to be essays for the Edinburgh and Foreign Reviews. 
One on Burns may be specially noted. Byron's 
popularity was still exercising a strong influence on 
literary tfl^ste, but Carlyle found in his own country- 
man a far truer standard of what is essential to 
poetry. He judged them as he judged all men and 
all books, by their truth to Nature, to the eternal 
fact of things, as his favourite phrase was, and found 
in Burns one who knew and loved the Real so well 
that he found in it the Ideal. Byron, we know, 
sought the reputation of originality by pouring scorn 
on all things, even the highest. Burns laid the foun- 
dation of more enduring fame by his love for all 
things, even the humblest. "A true-poet soul,^' 
says Carlyle, "for it needs but to be struck, and the 
sound it yields will be music.-" 

The monotony at Craigenputtock was relieved more 
than once by a visit from the Jeffreys, the Duke, as 
they affectionately called the critic, making the 
little drawing-room a very "Temple of the Muses'' 
with his mimicries and brilliant talk. But in seri- 
ous consultations things did not go on so well. 
Jeffrey, anxious to see his friends in better circum- 
stances, tried to persuade Carlyle to throw in his lot 
with the Whigs, and champion their measures. On 
such terms even the editorship of the Review might 
be open to him on Jeffrey's retirement. But Car- 
lyle, who never wrote a sentence that he did not 



20 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

believe, thought the Whig reforms superficial, and 
could not and would not bind himself to do partisan 
work. Jeffrey scoffed at him as being "dreadfully 
in earnest." The two men indeed were too different 
to work together, but to Jeffrey's honor, it must be 
told, that in spite of what he considered his friend's 
obstinacy, he begged him to accept an annuity of 
£100 till better days should come. To this Carlyle 
returned " the meekest, friendliest, most emphatic '* 
refusal. There was no more to be said — the old 
affection remained, but each went his own way. 
How hard a way Carlyle's was, we know from one 
of his letters to his brother in which he speaks of 
having only £5 with which to front the world. 

An entry in Carlyle's diary, in the year 1829, re- 
cords: "Written a strange piece on Clothes. Know 
not what will come of it." "I have a book in me,"^ 
he says again, " that will cause ears to tingle, and 
one day it must and will out." 

At last, not without sore travail, it was written, 
this wonderful spiritual autobiography, which he 
called Sartor Eesartus, i. e., the Tailor Out-Tailored. 
Many confessions of the inner life of great men have 
been given to the world — Augustine's, Bunyan's, 
Eousseau's, but surely never any in so odd a garb as 
this. With a whimsical reticence he hides himself 
under the double disguise of an editor giving to the 
British public the Life and Opinions of Herr Teu- 
felsdrockh, professor of Things in General in the 
University of Weissnichtwo. Teufelsdrockh is the 
embodiment and exponent of his philosophy, but in 
the editorial notes he has the advantage of antici- 



THOMAS GABLYLE. 21 

pating and overthrowing, with sometimes almost 
grotesque humor, the objections and oppositions of 
a Philistine public. The incidents of the profes- 
sor's story are some of them from Oarlyle's own life, 
translated, as it were, into German ; but they are 
mainly symbolical. He sketches the mysterious 
circumstances of his birth, the lonely childhood and 
youth of the boy who ''was like no other," his in- 
effectual struggles to bring his inner capabilities 
and his outward circumstances into harmony, and 
his " obstinate questionings " of the unintelligible 
world he found himself in. Then comes the Ro- 
mance Chapter, when for a time Love seemed the 
Solution of all things, the reconciliation of the 
Actual and the Ideal, and a sufficient reason for ex- 
istence. True, and yet not true. For Teufels- 
drockh as yet Love meant only Blumine, and when 
she was denied to him, all the lights of heaven were 
blotted out, and he was again a wanderer in an end- 
less wilderness, urged by continual unrest, trying to 
escape from himself, and demanding of destiny with 
added bitterness why he had been created at all. 
Was the Universe the Devil's then ? was the temp- 
ter's hideous suggestion. The turning-point of his 
history was in the reply, ''My whole Me," he says, 
"stood up in God-created Majesty and made an- 
swer : I am not thine, but am free, and forever hate 
thee." Slowly and by manifold experiences, he was 
led higher. jS"ature was no longer dead, but the 
garment of God ; human griefs and troubles, to 
know of, which had before only maddened him, be- 
came for him a Sanctuary of Sorrow where he could 



23 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

worship the Highest. "1 see a glimpse of it," he 
cries ; " there is in man a higher than love of hap- 
piness — he can do without happiness, and instead 
thereof find blessedness. Love not pleasure, love 
God. His is the Everlasting Yea wherein all con- 
tradictions are solved." 

This, then, is the professor's sole creed. It is 
Grod's world, and each man has to find out what 
work 'God has appointed him in it, and do it. But- 
while he is living on and for the Eternal, he has to 
adjust himself to what is passing, and try to estimate 
the value and proportions of the Visible world around 
him. It is for this end that he sets himself to think 
out his strange philosophy of Clothes. 

Whatsoever sensibly exists, our professor teaches, 
whatsoever represents spirit to spirit is properly 
a clothing, a suit of raiment, put oufora season, and 
to be laid off," and "the beginning of all wisdom is 
to look fixedly on Clothes till they become trans- 
parent. Taking this idea as our guiding line, we 
gradually come to see through the (at first sight) 
apparently chaotic utterances of Teufelsdr5ckh, 
whither he is leading us. Language is the garment 
of thought. Government, the clothing of men's 
ideas of their relations to each other, and religion 
itself, the vesture of their deeper thought on duty 
and destiny. If this be recognized and if we 
once for all acknowledge that clothing wears out, we 
shall be less dismayed at the changes and decay we 
see around us, even in what seems the very strong- 
hold of truth. Language alters from day to day, 
governments that no longer fit the needs of a nation 



THOMAS GABLYLE. 23 

must be thrown aside, or forcibly rent asunder, and 
'' if the thoughts of men are widening with the proc- 
ess of the suns" in religion too, there must be 
changed symbols for changed ideals. Yet such sym- 
bols, though passing in their nature, are necessary, 
and their connection with what they express is not ar- 
bitrary. As old forms decay, under the old the new 
is always being formed. Eevolution may shake the 
whole fabric of society, but the truth remains that 
men are brothers, and in some way it will find ex- 
pression, new institutions, new laws rising out of the 
very ashes of the old. So with all truth. It can reach 
our finite understanding only through its time-gar- 
ment, or symbol ; for, says our professor, in the sym^- 
bol, " the Infinite is made to blend with the finite, 
to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there. 

I have given a meager outline of some of the lead- 
ing thoughts in Sartor, but it is a book which defies 
any attempt to give a resume of it. There is no or- 
derly plan in the presentation of the thought, but the 
book is a picture of the writer's mind, and we have 
in it the confusion of doubts, the fermentation, the 
agonizing upheaval in which these seed-thoughts 
came to life. There is no logical consequent argu- 
ment, but rather those visions and glimpses that 
come to a man when his thought has carried him to 
its utmost limit. Such thought oftenest expresses 
itself in poetry, but Carlyle had not the gift of verse, 
and his matter had to create for itself a manner 
consonant with it. 

In describing Teufelsdrockh's style, Carlyle criti- 
cises his own : *' Striving with characteristic vehe- 



34 THOMAS GARLYLE. 

mence to paint this picture and the other, and ever 
without success, he at last desperately dashes his 
sponge full of all colours, against the canvas, to try 
whether it will paint foam." The metaphor is an 
apt one. It is when the river is forced into a narrow 
channel that the water surges and boils, and the 
abrupt vehemence of Carlyle's style leaves with us 
an impression of his chafing against the limits of 
language, his impatience with the inadequacy of all 
words to express the deepest thought. Yet the 
lesson of the whole is not vague. The Eternal is in 
the Present, has been in all ages the burden of the 
prophet's message to men wrapped up in the things 
of Time, and he that had ears to hear, heard it 
again in Sartor Eesartus. 

" It is a work of genius, dear," said Mrs. Carlyle 
— and she was no flattering critic — when her hus- 
band finished reading to her the MS. of Sartor. But 
we all know that works of genius are not always 
the most salable articles, and when he set off to 
London to find a publisher, it was only to meet with 
refusal after refusal. No one would take the risk of 
printing a book so totally unlike what the public 
was accustomed to. Carlyle during this visit saw a 
good deal of literary society, but found little re- 
freshment or comfort in it. He had had hopes of 
spiritual guidance from Coleridge, but on closer 
acquaintance, thought him " weak and ineffectual,'' 
and everywhere in society " gigmanity," as he 
scornfully called the worship of respectability, was 
rampant. As always, it filled him with a sort 
of rage mingled with remorse. ''Oh, my dear 



THOMAS CARL TLB. 25 

Jeaunie," he writes to his wife, " do help me to be 
a little more merciful to all men, even gigmen." 
Amongst his new acquaintances, John Stuart Mill 
attracted him most, but in all London he could still 
find no nobler man than Irving, and poor Irving 
was drifting further and further apart from him, 
carried away by the crowd of miracle workers and 
speakersuof strange tongues. 

This visit to the capital was chiefly memorable to 
him from the death of his father while he was there. 
Carlyle had small patience for everyday annoyances, 
but in the real troubles of life his bearing was always 
noble. The stern spirit of father and son had grown 
closer to each other as the years went on, and the 
blow was a crushing one to him, but he braced him- 
self -to learn the lesson of his father's life — honesty, 
thoroughness, independence. " I will write my 
books," he says, *'as my father built his bridges." 
His letters to his mother at this time are very tender 
and beautiful. He refused to take any part of the 
few hundred pounds to be divided in the family, 
as he had received a better education than his 
brothers and sisters. Yet he was still a very poor 
mau. •' In the spirit of my father," he says, 
speaking of his difficulties, " I will front them, and 
conquer them." 

Sartor came back, unprinted, with its author to 
Craigenputtock, but after some time was published 
in parts in Eraser's Magazine. Some mi ads are curi- 
ously irritated by what they do not understand, and 
Eraser received several letters from subscribers 
threatening to give up the magazine if such articles 



26 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

were allowed to appear. Two solitary instances of 
appreciative recognition were known to him — one 
came from a Eoman Catholic priest in Cork, the 
other from Emerson, 

For some time after his return from London, he 
had work for the Eeviews, but the ill-success of Sar- 
tor frightened the editors, and that, too, began to 
fail him. He spent a winter in Edinburgh, where 
he made one more unsuccessful effort to obtain a 
chair in the University, but he did not find himself 
in the right place there. The Whig element in the 
Scottish capital was strong, and the politicians of 
the Reform Bill had hoped to find in him a power- 
ful ally, but closer acquaintance only made the breach 
between them wider. He found in them men of 
measures rather than of principles, and saw that 
there could be no bond between their ^'Whiggism 
and Opinion," and his "Radicalism and Belief." It 
was not in Carlyle's nature to cooperate with men 
with whom his agreement was not fundamental. 
Politics, indeed, never could have furnished a field 
for his activity, for compromise was impossible to 
him. It was the Dynamics, as Professor Masson 
says, not the Mechanics of Humanity, that he was 
versed in. No man had a keener eye for the forces 
which move society, but skill in the adjustments of 
the machine of government to these forces was not 
given him. 

He left Edinburgh and went back again to the 
moors and his meditations, but he could not settle. 
Solitude had done much for him, but it was only a 
preparation. He needed books, and above all, he 



THOMAS CAEL7LE. 27 

needed contact with men. A sudden resolve was 
made. Carlyle went to London — the march of men 
on the street was music to him, he said — and took 
the house in 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which was 
to be his home to the end, more than 40 years after. 
Very soon his wife joined him. One little incident 
of the Craigenputtock life, however, must be noted 
before '^e shift the scene to London. In Oarlyle's 
diary of August, 1833, one day is marked with the 
entry : Ealph Waldo Emerson. This was the be- 
ginning of a long friendship, and perhaps, except 
Goethe, there was no contemporary Carlyle vener- 
ated more than Emerson. " He is one of the most 
lovable creatures we ever looked on,^^ he wrote to 
his mother of the young American. Two remarks 
made by Emerson show how, at this time, he under- 
stood the man, who was to write the French Revo- 
lution and the Hero Worship. " He was honest and 
true, and cognizant of the subtle links that bind 
ages together, and saw how every event affects all 
the future." And again, ''He worships any man 
that will manifest a truth to him." With great 
differences of character and opinion, there were also 
strong sympathies between the New Englander and 
the Scotchman. ''A tranquil, high sailing, fair- 
weather cloud is Emerson, and a massive, heavy 
storm cloud is Carlyle," says John Burroughs, con- 
trasting the two. Carlyle^s words of wisdom are 
never so perfected, so distilled into precious flawless 
drops as Emerson's, yet, because what he has given 
us seems to have cost him more — more struggle 
with himself and his destiny — it touches us more 



28 THOMAS GABLYLE. 

nearly. Perhaps the two together have done more 
than any other to save thinking minds in our time 
from the materialism, which the half-understood 
advances of science have developed, 

Eren before Carlyle went to London it became 
clear to him that his strength must not be wasted in 
magazine articles, but that another hooh must be 
written. In Sartor he has pictured the struggles of 
the individual man to set himself right with the 
eternal fact of things ; he had now to speak of 
society and its relations to the laws of the universe. 
To him all history was a Bible, written full of in- 
stances of God's blessing on just and truthful action, 
and His unfailing, though often tardy, vengeance on 
hollowness and injustice. Nowhere is the lesson 
written in larger or more unmistakable characters 
thanin the French Revolution, "I could scarcely 
have kept my faith in a God," says Carlyle some- 
where, "if it had not been for the French Ee volu- 
tion." His thoughts on this subject began to take 
shape. The process was always with him one of 
effort and pain, "The new chapter of myhistory,'' 
he writes to his brother, " as yet lies all too confused ; 
I look round on innumerable fluctuating masses ; 
can begin to build no edifice for them. My mind 
would so fain deliver itself adequately of that Divine 
idea of the world, and only in quite inadequate ap- 
proximation is such deliverance possible." 

His deliverance was certainly unlike any other 
writings of history, from the monkish chronicles of 
olden times downwards to the philosophical treatises 
of the 19 th century ; yet the best of all kinds is in 



THOMAS OABLYLE. 29 

it. Facts, minutest details even, are painted in the 
most vivid colors, and philosophy is not wanting, 
but the reader will not find it in cut and dry sen- 
tences, ready for quotation ; it is in and behind the 
presentation of facts, held, as it were, in solution by 
them. The dignity of history is nothing to him, its 
seriousness is everything. We cannot read this 
historju calmly as a thing altogether of the past. 
Scene after scene is made present to us, and we are 
forced to live through them, hoping and fearing 
with the actors in them, yet horror-struck that they 
do not see as we do, whither they are being hurried. 
We see the court, busy with its ceremonies, thinking 
the world must go on as it has always done, and we 
come to know at close quarters the hungry, restless 
multitude, in whose eyes a new light is shining, for 
the new idea has been born in them that the world 
need not go on as hitherto. We hear the crash of 
the bastile when the people first feel within them- 
selves the force to make the new era of their desires, 
and we can scarcely help hoping with the Assembly, 
in its first flush of strength, that Liberty, Equality 
and Fraternity are really at hand. Then, as passions 
are let loose, we feel the darkening of these hopes, 
and are hurried on through all the wild horrors of 
the Tribunals, the Guillotine, and the Massacres. 
No detail of circumstance, speech, look or clothing 
is too trivial to be recorded, but we seem to have 
forced on us a sort of Teufelsdrockh vision which 
grasps their significance, and looks through them to 
the spiritual forces behind. For our guide never 
forgets that it is the history of men and women 



30 THOMAS GABLYLE. 

that he is writing. " Masses indeed/^ he exclaims, 
"the masses consist all of units, every unit of whom 
has his own heart and sorrows/' He finds a kinship 
with the wild-eyed, dishevelled tricoteuse, and, none 
the less, his voice takes on a touch of tenderness 
whenever he speaks of Marie Antoinette. To him 
every human being is a miracle and a mystery. 
" There are depths in man," we quote him again, 
"that go the lengths of lowest Hell, as there are 
heights that reach the highest Heaven, for are not 
both Heaven and Hell made out of him ? " It is 
nothing less than the action of these elemental forces 
in human nature, when the utter breaking up of 
customs, habits, formulas, all that binds men to 
the beaten paths, gave them free scope, that is laid 
bare to us in this wonderful history. The French 
Revolution is one act of a drama that is not yet 
played out, and the strong light of Carlyle's genius 
by which we see it, makes us feel more than ever 
that we cannot fully explain it or tabulate its causes 
and effects, but we close the book, feeling that two 
lessons at least have been well driven home, and 
that any injustice, any lie against Nature, cannot 
last forever, but will bring with it in the end its 
own judgment, and that whoever will amend society 
must first begin with himself. 

" The book,'' Oarlyle wrote to his friend Sterling, 
''came not out of my own soul, born of blackness, 
whirlwind and sorrow," and this time his words did 
find ready response in the minds of thinking men. 
The book gave him at once a place in the ranks of 
the foremost men of his time. The work had been 



TH0MA8 CABLYLE. 3i 

an exhausting one, all the worse from his having 
the first volume not only to write, but to think 
and feel over again a second time. He had lent the 
MS. to Stuart Mill, who, by some carelessness, 
allowed it to be thrown into the fire. Oarlyle's first 
words to his wife, when Mill left, after his painful 
confession, were : " Poor fellow, he is terribly cut 
up. We must endeavor to hide from him how 
very serious this business is to us.''' We may as 
well remember this incident when we hear the oft- 
repeated accusations against him of harshness and 
selfishness. 

He went ofE to rest in Scotland, to lie about the 
roots of hedges, his wife said, and speak to no man, 
woman or child, except in monosyllables, but his 
empty purse soon admonished him to be up and 
doing. 

His friends, knowing the great force of his per- 
sonality, had persuaded him to come face to face 
with the public, and arranged for a course of lec- 
tures to be given by him. Three such courses were 
given at intervals during the next few years — on 
Grerman Literature, on The General History of 
Literature, and lastly on Heroes. The second 
course has been published from notes for the first 
time in the present year. The last, collected and 
published as " Hero- Worship," makes up, with Sar- 
tor and the French Eevolution, the two of Oarlyle's 
most widely read and most infiuential books. 

In reading the French Eevolution we constantly 
feel that it has been written from a point of view 
with which Sartor has made us familiar. In the 



32 THOMAS GABLYLE. 

same way the main ideas in the lectures on Heroes 
have their roots in the French Revolution. Mira- 
beau and Danton are the two outstanding figures 
there — the only two to whom Carlyle, in spite of 
all their faults, does homage. These two alone 
were men strong enough to bear rule, and they were 
strong in virtue of their sincerity. While other 
men were striving to bring in the New with phrases 
and theories, they alone saw the thing that was, 
and would have built on that, had building been then 
possible. This sincerity or originality of the whole 
moral and intellectual nature is the one necessary 
element in the character of Carlyle^s heroes. The 
man who has genuine insight, who lives in " direct 
communion with the inner fact of things, '' "who is 
himself a portion of the primal reality of things " — 
this is the man whom in thought and action he 
would have us follow and obey — for it is in obedi- 
ence to its heroes that he places the salvation of 
society. 

We have seen how in his essay on German Litera- 
ture he has spoken of literary men as a perpetual 
priesthood appointed to interpret to each age in 
such form as it required, the Divine Idea of the 
World. Dante, the poet-hero, showed to his age the 
gulf that separates good and evil by painting the 
horrors of the Inferno and the glories of Paradise ; 
later, when Northern Europe had thrown off the 
incubus of priestcraft, Shakespeare, too great to 
insist on any one side of Truth, reasserted faith in 
human nature by his creations of men and women 
so living and true we speak of them as real. But 



THOMAS CABLTLE. 33 

there are times, too, when the necessary form of 
truth must be expressed in action rather than 
words. Luther, therefore, nailing his thesis to the 
church-door, or burning the papal bull, Cromwell, 
charging at the head of his Ironsides, Napoleon, 
even, in the earlier and nobler part of his career, 
when his genius gave form and created channels for 
the new-Uorn activity of the French people — these, 
too, were heroes and interpreters of the Divine Idea. 

Noble and heart-searching as these studies on 
heroes are, I think we find in them the germs of 
the errors that warped the development of Carlyle's 
character and genius, and not only saddened but 
distorted his outlook on the world. His pages are 
full of fierce and scornful impatience of society as 
he found it, and his contempt is turned against 
what are claimed as its virtues even more than its 
vices. His denunciations are often, perhaps often- 
est, only too well-deserved, but in his hasty scorn 
for sentimental benevolence or ''mealy-mouthed 
philanthropy " he was guilty of overlooking genuine 
humanity and self-sacrifice. He sometimes passed 
a hero himself without knowing him. His great 
error seems to have been a too complete identification 
of virtue and intellect. 

He was right in maintaining that a man's char- 
acter must be looked on as one and indivisible, alto- 
gether right in insisting that greatness is only 
possible where there is a union of high mental and 
moral qualities. But he carried his idealification 
too far : He was too unwilling to see virtue where it 
was not accompanied by intellectual force ; and was 



34 THOMAS GABLTLE. 

often blinded, alike to tlie evil in his chosen heroes, 
and to the good in the masses of humbler men. 

His lectures brought him a moderate sum of 
money and a good deal of fame. The money could 
not but be welcome, but from the popularity — 
which had much of the fashionable element in it — 
he recoiled with a sort of horror. Recognition of 
the real value of his work was always precious to 
him, but mere applause he turned from as a temp- 
tation, all the more that he felt there was a lower 
side of his nature to which it appealed. The excite- 
ment of delivery was unpleasant to him, and he was 
anxious to be done with the whole thing as a mixture 
of "prophecy and play-acting.'^ Carlyle's original 
personality, his strong, earnest voice, with the broad 
Annandale accent seem to have made a deep impres- 
sion on the brilliant London audience. Even his 
difficulty of utterance seems to have made them feel 
the power of his thought. " Never mind, my dear," 
whispered a lady to Mrs. Carlyle, who was anxiously 
watching him writhing in what she called an agony 
of incipiency, "never mind, they like it.'' Of more 
value to him, however, than their expressions of 
enthusiasm, was the news that came from over the 
border of his old mother "greetin"* over the chap- 
ters on Luther and Knox. 

Of all Oarlyle's great men none was nearer his 
heart than Oliver Cromwell. He seemed to him 
the last of the heroes who had by any great effort 
tried to make Grod's kingdom on earth a reality, and 
he was bent on giving a clear picture of him to his 

* Weeping. 



THOMAS OABLYLE. 35 

own generation. His journal and letters begin to 
be filled with the groans and lamentations which 
with him always preceded the bringing forth of a 
new book. " Oliver is an impossibility to me," he 
writes in despair. " I am, as it were, without a 
language. No Cromwell will ever come out of me in 
this world." He was turned aside from this work, 
howeve»5 by the desire to give some answer to the 
accusations brought against him that he was need- 
lessly maligning the present time by his indictment 
of falseness, injustice and greed. The question, 
" Is the world better now than in the Past ? Is man 
happier, not to say worthier, than he was before our 
boasted advances of the Modern era ? " has been dis- 
cussed a thousand times. Carlyle felt that his an- 
swer must be a sorrowful No. It was to speak his 
mind on this subject that he wrote the book called 
Past and Present. He pictured the state of things 
in Feudal times when each man had distinct claims 
on society and distinct duties assigned to him by 
society, when, if there were bonds and restrictions, 
the poorest were protected and fed, and when the 
obligations of men to each other were at least in 
some degree recognized and embodied in the social 
framework. He contrasted it with our own times, 
when, if every man has liberty, it is for many at 
times only liberty to starve. Good government, 
much more than liberty, was the ideal he set before 
him. It is of little value, he insists, to have dispo- 
sessed bad rulers if we do not make sure that we 
choose good ones. The system of laissez-faire, 
which at the time he wrote was the doctrine upheld 



36 THOMAS CARLTLE. 

by the Liberal Statesmen of England, seemed to 
him a denial of the doctrine of the brotherhood of 
man, and, as such, doomed. 

The diflScult question of how far a government 
has the right to interfere with the individual's lib- 
erty, even for his good, cannot be discussed here ; 
but there is no doubt that public sentiment in 
Great Britain on this subject has greatly changed in 
the last twenty years, and this is probably very 
largely owing to Carlyle's influence. The laissez- 
faire system has been to a great extent abandoned, 
and compulsory education, sanitary, and labor acts, 
land courts and labor commissions have shown how 
earnest has been the desire that government should 
deal with these social problems. 

It is noticeable that in Carlyle's hopes for the 
future it was always to the government that he looked. 
There were other men in England, who looked first 
to the Church. With these men he had often strong 
sympathies, but with the Church as an ecclesiastical 
organization he would have nothing whatever to do. 
The truer, wider idea of the church as the body of 
truly living humanity, united to its great Head, and 
therefore really in vital connection with the source 
of all Power, he seems never fairly to have grasped. 
It was the want of this belief in a living Church, 
working from within, slowly and surely, as leaven in 
the mass that made him turn more and more to the 
idea of a strong government which would compel 
men into the right way, as the best hope for the nation. 

A true account of the Puritan Commonwealth 
would, he thought, furnish the most forcible ex- 



THOMAS CABLTLE. 37 

ample of this, and again he set to work on Crom- 
well. The task seemed to him more necessary, 
because this chapter of history had been as yet 
almost universally misread, and the hero of it mis- 
understood. No efforts to get at original sources of 
information were too toilsome for him. At last 
thi-ough Cromwell's own letters. Journal, and des- 
patches,*and contemporary records, he succeeded in 
conceiving and painting what he really believed — 
and his conscience was exacting in these matters — 
to be an authentic portrait of the man. The book 
is called Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, with 
Elucidations. There was less of his own work in it 
than in his other books, but he seemed to be more 
contented with it than he usually was, and to have 
enjoyed a genuine satisfaction that at last the world 
had a representation of Cromwell, not as the schem- 
ing hypocrite, but as one of the greatest and godli- 
est of men, whose right it was to rule England, 
because he was the only man fit to do it. 

Of course, Carlyle did not advocate a return to the 
feudalism of the early times (described in Past and 
Present), or the religious despotism of Cromwell. 
These might be considered an outworn clothing, but 
in different form he would have applied his ideas 
on strong government to the questions of his own 
time. Freedom was to be desired, but unless there 
was a real spiritual freedom existing in a people, 
political enfranchisement was worse than useless. 
In one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, called "Nigger 
Emancipation," which brought him great unpopu- 
larity, he advocates the continuance of slavery on 



38 THOMAS GARLTLE. 

the ground that the negroes were fit for nothing 
else. When the American Civil War broke out he 
took up the same ground, and espoused the cause of 
the South, though his biographer records that he 
afterwards admitted to him that perhaps he had not 
seen to the bottom of that question. It must be 
confessed that these pamphlets and his later pro- 
ductions generally are marked by an increasing 
arrogance of tone, and a tendency to push his fav- 
orite theories to extremes. The fact is, Carlyle had 
not altogether escaped the dangers that beset great 
men. He had been raised to the position of a seer 
or prophet, listened to with reverent admiration and 
docility. Too little contradiction is not good for 
any man. 

The Carlyles had now made good their position in 
the highest literary circle of London. They still 
lived in the old house at Chelsea. Their life there 
was almost as simple and frugal as at first, but the 
pinch of poverty was over. Conventionality was 
the last thing they could be accused of, but they 
were just as free from anything like Bohemianism. 
"Nobody could tell," says Miss Jewsbury, '^ whether 
they were rich or poor," so dignified, yet so simple 
were the arrangements. Mrs. Oarlyle's letters have 
recorded all her difficulties and her triumphs in her 
little home- kingdom, and, indeed, have made famil- 
iar to us all the outs and ins of the everyday life 
at Cheyne Eow. . Her power of putting a picture 
before us is as vivid in its own way as her husband^s, 
and whether she is describing an evening with 
Tennyson, or only the woes of a washing day, her 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 39 

story is always worth hearing. We know all about 
the battles against the 'Memon-fowl " in the neigh- 
boring yard, the building of the sound-proof room, 
and the thousand and one contrivances to keep 
noises away from the irascible old philosopher, and 
the philosopher's overwhelming eloquence when they 
were not successful. We know the pet names, the 
family jotes, and the "little language," as Swift calls 
it, that had grown up between the two from years of 
common memories. We can trace all the changes of 
the family barometer, and, alas ! all the world knows 
too well, that it did not always point to " calm " 
and '^set fair.'' Carlyle's groans and lamentations 
over his dyspepsia and his sleeplessness, the music 
of the organ-grinders, and the inefBciency of his 
tailors were never ending, and now and again drove 
his wife to desperation. He had his little erup- 
tion of superlatives and forgot about it, but the 
sting of any difference stayed longer with her. But 
more than enough has been said of this ; at the 
core they were loyal to each other, and at any touch 
of real trouble the deep tenderness that was always 
there was ready to show itself. It seems to me one 
proof of their essential union to each other, that 
they loved and were loved by the same friends, and 
that Mrs. Carlyle v/as always on terms of warm 
affection with her husband's family. I should like 
to quote a few words from Mrs. Oliphant, one of 
these friends. "■ We confess, for our own part," 
she writes, "that the manner of mind which can 
deduce from this long autobiography (the letters) 
an idea injurious to the perfect union of these two 



40 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

souls is, to us, incomprehensible. They tormented 
each other, but not half so much as each tormented 
him and herself. They were in the fullest sense 
everything to each other, both good and evil, sole 
comforters, chief tormentors. " 111 to hae, and 
waur to want,^^ says the Scotch proverb. Sometimes 
Carlyle was " ill to have" but it is abundantly evi- 
dent that he was " waur to want," i. e., worse to do 
without to his wife. To him, though he wounded 
her in a hundred small ways, there is no evidence 
that she was ever anything else than the most desir- 
able of women, understood and acknowledged as the 
setter right of all things, the providence, and first 
authority of his life. " I have only him," writes 
Mrs. Carlyle, herself, to her mother-in-law, "not 
but that numberL of people love me more than I 
deserve, but then his fashion is so different from all 
these, and seems alone to suit the crotchety creature 
I am." 

There were few people of note in London who 
were not eager to have the entree to Cheyne Eow. 
Leigh Hunt was one of their first intimates, Maz- 
zini another of their most valued friends; John 
Sterling, Froude, John Foster, Dickens, Kingsley, 
Maurice, Tennyson, came and went. Carlyle often 
grumbled at the interruptions of visitors, but once 
drawn into the circle, no one was brighter or more 
eager to talk. *'The imagery, his wild play of 
humour, the immense knowledge always evident 
under the grotesque forms it assumed, were so daz- 
zling and entertaining," says Mr. Froude, "that we 
lost the use of our own faculties till it was over." 



THOMAS CABL7LE. 41 

There was a curious reaction noticeable in him 
sometimes after an evening of this kind — a dissat- 
isfaction with himself, as if he thought he was per- 
haps guilty of "^ the clatter " his father had taught 
him to abhor. 

Carlyle's dearest friends were always those of his 
own family — dearest of all was his mother. He 
lost her'^n 1853, and it is very touching to see the 
orphaned motherless feeling in the gray-haired man, 
now nearly sixty years of age. ''To lose my 
mother," he said once, " was the terror of my child- 
hood, and it has followed me ever since." 

To go back once more to his literary work, the 
Life of John Sterling was published in 1851. It 
was a labor of love, and is written in softer, quieter 
tones than any of his other books. Sterling had 
been the best beloved of his disciples, and, though 
his life had already been written by Archdeacon 
Hare, Carlyle felt " commissioned " to give what he 
thought a truer picture of the man. In 1853 he 
began the most arduous task he had ever under- 
taken — the History of Frederic the Great. Its 
preparation gave him an immense amount of labor, 
and so swallowed up his nights and days, his whole 
thoughts and cares, that, as his wife said, " they 
lived in the Valley of the Shadow of Frederic." 
Two journeys to Grermany were made that the veri- 
fication of his statements might be complete. It 
cost him thirteen years of hard toil. I feel embold- 
ened after saying this, to confess I have not yet had 
courage to begin so large a book, and can only quote 
the opinions of others. Froude thinks it the great- 



42 THOMAS GABLYLE. 

est of all Carlyle's works, and the best example of 
his peculiar power as a historian. " To penetrate 
really into the hearts and souls of men/' he says, 
" to give each his due, to represent him as he ap- 
pears at his best and not to his enemies, to sympa- 
thize in the collision of principles with each party 
in turn, to feel as they felt, to think as they thought, 
and to reproduce the various beliefs and acquire- 
ments of another age is a task which requires gifts 
as great or greater than those of the dramatist ; 
all is required of the historian which is required of 
the dramatist, with the obligation to truth of ascer- 
tained fact besides. And this was Carlyle's special 
gift, to bring dead people and dead things back to 
life, and show us men and women playing their 
parts on the mortal stage as real flesh and blood." 
How much accuracy accompanied Carlyle's imagina- 
tive insight is shown by the fact that his accounts of 
Frederic's battles are prescribed as military studies 
for German ofi&cers. 

The book was translated into German and much 
read. Some years afterwards he received a letter 
from Prince Bismarck, with the insignia of the 
order of merit. He was much gratified with this 
recognition of his work, but could not omit his 
usual growl when the decoration arrived. "A quar- 
ter of a pound of good tobacco would probably have 
added more to his happiness," he said. 

One honor bestowed on him in his later years he 
very keenly appreciated, and to his wife it meant 
even more. The rectorship of Edinburgh Univer- 
sity — an honorary office — was bestowed on him. 



THOMAS CARLTLE. 43 

Their life in Edinburgh had been in the days of 
obscurity and poverty, when Mrs. Carlyle's friends 
thought she had done a very foolish thing in marry- 
ing the son of the plain Annandale farmer. It was 
very sweet to her now that Edinburgh should prove 
to them they were wrong by welcoming him as the 
foremost Scotchman of his time. He went north 
to make the customary speech to the students, and 
his reception by the young hero-worshippers and by 
the city at large was beyond expectation enthusias- 
tic. His address to the young men was a summing 
up of his whole lifers teaching — an exhortation to 
simplicity, thoroughness, earnestness and rever- 
ence. He was puzzled, his biographer tells us, why 
he was received with such universal acclamations — 
he was only saying what he had said a hundred 
times before more forcibly. One feels inclined to 
suggest that it was exactly because of the absence of 
the forcible tone. He was moved to a gentle mood 
by the youthful eagerness of the lads looking up to 
him for guidance, and said his say without his 
.usual vituperation. Be that as it may, this Edin- 
burgh appearance gave a sudden impulse to his pop- 
ularity. A new edition of Sartor, which 30 years 
before had been unable to find a publisher, was 
called for, and 20,000 copies were immediately 
sold. 

Mrs. Carlyle had been in painful anxiety about 
the effect of the excitement on her husband, now an 
old man of over seventy, and when the telegram, 
*^a perfect triumph," sent by Professor Tyndall, 
arrived, there was much rejoicing in Oheyne Eow. 



44 THOMAS GABLTLE. 

''What pleases me most/' slie writes, "is the hearty 
personal affection that comes out on all hands : all 
that is positively delightful, and makes it a good 
joy to me/' 

Her husband was never to see her again. He 
turned aside, on his way home, to visit a sister, and 
there he received the dreadful tidings of her sudden 
death. 

Carlyle lived fifteen years after his wife, but to 
the end his sense of loss seemed scarcely dulled, or 
his grief less passionate. He lived over the past 
again, and morbidly exaggerated every little out- 
burst of temper or want of consideration till his 
whole life was shadowed with remorse. He compiled 
the Eeminiscences of her Life, and collected her 
letters, annotating them with explanations, and 
adding little notes, in which he breaks out — poor 
lonely old man ! — into fond, lover-like language over 
his Jeannie, " his bonny little woman/' " Oh 
think ! if thou yet love anybody living," he says to 
us, "wait not till death sweep down the little paltry 
dust-clouds and idle dissonances of the moment, and 
all be at last so mournfully and beautifully clear; 
when it is too late." 

There is not very much to record of these last 
years of feebleness and sorrow. What he did write 
is sad reading. Literature, Politics, Eeligion all 
seemed to him to be building on shifting sands. 
Literature was frothy. Politics, a following of loud 
talkers instead of honest doers, while in Eeligion, he 
saw little but Materialism, which he dreaded on the 
one hand, and Cant, still more to be abhorred on the 



TH0MA8 GARLYLE. 45 

other. It is the old story of the prophet who needed 
to be reminded that there were seven thousand in 
Israel who had not bent the knee to Baal. The man 
who feels himself commissioned, as Carlyle did, to 
denounce the failings of the times, will, if he be not 
kept very humble, see nothing but failings. It is 
pleasant to find, however, that this gloomy humor 
did not dry up his practical kindness and helpfulness. 
Hundreds of people — young men very often — 
applied to him for advice and help. He gave the 
most painstaking thought to these cases, and was 
very generous if money could be of any use. There 
was plenty of money now, he said mournfully. 
Honors, too, came unsought. The Queen offered 
him a pension and the Grand Cross of the Bath, but 
both were respectfully refused. 

He had many friends, too, who vied with each 
other in trying to cheer him. He was not ungrate- 
ful, but the same feeling came always uppermost in 
his talk or in writing — the weary, weary. At last, 
the end came. He died on the 5th of February, 
1881. Westminster Abbey was offered as a place of 
burial, as was fitting, and, as was fitting, it was re- 
fused. A few days later, he was laid, in utter 
silence, as the Scotch fashion is, by the side of his 
father and mother in the green churchyard at Eccle- 
fechan. 

What has he done for us ? What do we owe him ? 
What place the literary judgment of another genera- 
tion will assign him it is too soon to know. His 
own faculty for literary form he rated very low. 
He knew he had much to say, that must be said at 



46 THOMAS GARLTLE. 

all cost, but his difficulty in expression was often 
great. It is not, however, the literary student who 
turns most eagerly to Carlyle. It is the man who 
wishes to settle the basis of his own life. He was a 
man of few ideas, it has been said, and indeed in his 
pages we find the constant reiteration of the same 
thoughts in different forms. Be real, get to the 
bottom of things, hold fast what is eternal, work ac- 
cording to your belief, and be sure that a just God 
will call you to account. This may not be new 
teaching, but it needed all his burning earnestness, 
his intense conviction, and the fire of his genius to 
get a right hearing for it in this nineteenth century 
of ours. The experience of anyone who follows the 
course of Carlyle^s life and teaching must be a great 
sadness. It will only satisfy us if we go further. 
Long ago he had written in Sartor : "Yes, to me 
also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness 
of battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while 
life or faculty was left."' He had a long battle, 
but to the end we miss the note of Victory. And 
yet in a sense Victory has been his. All his life 
Carlyle stood aloof from the church, yet it is there 
that his influence has been deepest and most last- 
ing. If in the church of to-day there is a greater 
desire to follow Truth wherever it may lead us 
— a greater willingness to receive its revelations 
through whatever channels they may come, a 
greater dislike to pious conventionality, a stronger 
dread of speaking what we do not feel, or seeming 
the thing we are not — we owe it greatly to Thomas 
Carlyle. 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 47 

An imperfect man — none knew it better than 
himself — yet a heroic soul. He, too, was one of the 
perpetual priesthood, an interpreter of the Divine 
Idea. 



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